Why Marine Conservation Biology?

Elliott A. Norse and Larry B. Crowder

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS, member of the US Commission on Ocean Policy

For many people old enough to remember, 1962 was the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came very close to nuclear self-immolation. The missiles and bombers were ready to launch, but—just barely—people in positions of power made difficult choices, and sanity prevailed. That same year, marine biologist Rachel Carson alerted the world to another crisis that we humans had made for ourselves. Before then, humankind had largely overlooked our impact on our environment. But Carson's (1962) best-selling Silent Spring demonstrated that "progress" (in this case, from new synthetic chemical pesticides) is threatening the integrity of our natural world. In 1969, widely televised footage of dying seabirds from an oil well blowout in California's Santa Barbara Channel quickly catalyzed a broad-based environmental movement that led to passage of a flood of new and strengthened environmental laws in the United States and beyond. A decade later, Lovejoy (1980), Myers (1979), and Norse and McManus (1980) showed that our planet is losing its biological diversity, and Soulé and Wilcox (1980) called upon the world's scientists to join forces to work to stop the accelerating erosion of life on Earth. These were wake-up calls that society could no longer afford to ignore. Yet, ironically, the visionary and courageous Rachel Carson, who had written three best-selling books about the wonders of the sea as well as Silent Spring, said almost nothing in these books about human impacts on the sea. And despite the Santa Barbara oil spill's role in mobilizing the public, decision makers, and scientists, environmental consciousness focused mainly on land and freshwaters. Having been jolted into awareness by a marine biologist and mobilized by an offshore oil spill, the environmental movement nonetheless shifted its attention away from the sea.

Of course, our species evolved on land, and we tend to focus on what we can readily see. Although our Paleozoic ancestors were marine animals, they left the sea hundreds of millions of years ago, and humans' physiological mechanisms and senses are ill-suited for acquiring knowledge beneath the sea's wavy, mirrored surface. This profoundly affects marine conservation because, on land, people can see at least some of the consequences of our activities on ecosystems and species. Such understanding forms a basis for social, economic, and legal processes that can protect biodiversity. But judging the integrity of marine ecosystems and their species is far more difficult because most people never go below the sea surface and cannot gauge the health of a marine ecosystem. Rather, the general public and key decision makers (including legislators, agency officials, industrialists, funders, and environmental advocates) depend on those with information about what occurs beneath the surface, especially fishermen, offshore oil drillers, and marine scientists. And because people who extract commodities from the sea have strong economic incentive to minimize public concerns about marine biodiversity loss, marine scientists are by far the most credible providers of information.

It is difficult even for scientists to appreciate how the sea has changed. On that Pleistocene day when our ancestors first stood on an African shore and looked seaward, they must have been stunned by the wealth of marine life they saw. Were the mudflats paved with mollusks? Did the sea surface boil with fishes? Could dugongs and green sea turtles have filled the shallows like wildebeests and zebras on the plains? We cannot know for certain, but scientific information increasingly coming to light from around the world suggests that the sea was home to an astounding diversity and abundance of life as recently as hundreds, even tens of years ago (Crowder, Chapter 2). It was only in the 1990s (Butman and Carlton 1995; Norse 1993; Thorne-Miller and Catena 1991) that scientists assembled compelling information showing that biological diversity in the sea is imperiled worldwide. And not until the International Year of the Ocean did 1,605 the world's scientists join forces to publicly voice their concern about marine biodiversity loss in a statement called Troubled Waters: A Call for Action (MCBI 1998) (Box 1.1).

The land and freshwaters are anything but safe, and no knowledgeable person would suggest that we can afford to reduce our commitment to them, but it is also time to focus much more attention on the sea. The sea's vital signs are disquieting: most everywhere scientists look—in tropical and polar waters, urban estuaries and remote oceans, the sunlit epipelagic zone and seamounts in the black depths—we are seeing once-abundant species disappearing, noxious species proliferating, ecosystem functions changing, and fisheries collapsing. And although nature is always changing, these changes are without precedent in 65 million years, since a giant meteorite smashed into Earth, causing the extinction of dinosaurs, mosasaurs, ammonites, and countless other species (Ward 1994). Moreover, this time it is not a mindless mass of rock that threatens the sea's biodiversity. It is our...